Crazy Horse - Native American History - HISTORY.com Google Since his violent and controversial death, Crazy Horse, or Tashunka Witko, has become almost a mythical figure of the Great Plains Indian wars. The place and date of his birth are uncertain, but he was probably born in the early 1840s near Bear Butte on the Belle Fourche River in South Dakota . His father was a medicine man of the Oglala subtribe, his mother a Brulé. There has been much speculation about the origin of the name Crazy Horse, but most historians now agree that his father had the same name. As a youth he was known as Curly, but acquired the father’s name after proving himself in combat. Did You Know? The Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota has been under construction since 1948. When it is completed, it will be the world's largest sculpture. He was below average height, his body lithe, his hair and complexion lighter than that of most Indians. Various photographs bear his name, but most have been discredited, and probably none is genuine. Except for his last days near Fort Robinson, Nebraska , he was out of reach of frontier photographers. His first encounter with U.S.

soldiers was on the old Oregon Trail, July 25, 1865, at Platte Bridge, where he acted as a decoy to draw soldiers out of their defenses. During the following year, when soldiers marched up the Bozeman Trail to build forts, Crazy Horse honed his skills as a guerrilla fighter and studied the ways of his military adversaries. In December 1866, when the Sioux and Cheyenne combined to challenge Fort Phil Kearny, Crazy Horse’s daring as a leader of the decoy warriors brought Lt. Col. William J. Fetterman and eighty men into an ambush that became known as the Fetterman massacre. During the following decade, Crazy Horse joined Sitting Bull in an unyielding determination to defend the Black Hills and resist reservation control. When the U.S. Army mounted a three-pronged military operation in 1876 to drive the “free” Plains Indians onto reservations, Crazy Horse confronted the column led by Gen. George Crook at Rosebud Creek, June 17. He concentrated his warriors against weak spots in Crook’s lines, fighting hand to hand at times to win the day.

After the battle, the victors rode over to the Little Bighorn to join Sitting Bull’s large encampment of Sioux and Cheyenne. On the twenty-fifth, Gen. George A. Custer’s column attacked the camp, and Crazy Horse and Gall, a chief of the Hunkpapa Sioux, led their warriors in a pincers attack that quickly enveloped Custer’s divided cavalry and wiped it out. Other military forces pursued the Indians, eventually driving Sitting Bull into Canada. Crazy Horse and his followers attempted to hold out in remote areas of the Yellowstone country, but soldiers hunted them relentlessly. On May 6, 1877, he gave himself up and spent the summer near Fort Robinson, awaiting the assignment to a reservation that had been promised him for surrendering. The events affecting Crazy Horse during that long summer were imbued with elements of classical tragedy. Deceptions, betrayals, and false rumors engulfed him. He was disliked by some of the older Indian leaders, and because of his popularity among the young warriors, rumors spread that he was planning an outbreak. When on September 5 he was arrested, he offered no resistance at first.

But when he saw that he was to be locked in a guardhouse, he struggled with his captors and was stabbed to death. From the day of its occurrence this incident has been described in several versions, all adding to the mystique of Crazy Horse. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Tags Biography - Crazy Horse Was Chief of the Lakota, a Warrior and a Holy Man (VOA Special English 2006-11-12) Crazy Horse Was Chief of the Lakota, a Warrior and a Holy Man Download MP3 (Right-click or option-click the link.) I'm Phoebe Zimmermann. And I'm Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Today, we tell the story of a Native American, Crazy Horse. He was a leader of the Lakota Indians. Some people call his tribe the Oglala Sioux. Crazy Horse's people belonged to one of seven great families who called themselves Lakota. The word Lakota means friends or allies. The Lakota people were hunters.

They moved with the seasons. They moved through the great flat lands and the great mountains of the north-central United States. The Lakota depended on wild animals for food and clothing, and for the materials to make their tools and homes. They depended especially on the buffalo, the great hairy ox-like creature. Huge groups of buffalo ran free across their lands. Great changes came to the Indian territories during the middle eighteen hundreds. The population of the United States was growing. Settlers left the cities of the East for the wide open spaces of the West. The settlers followed the railroads extending across the continent. More settlers moved west when gold was discovered in California in eighteen forty-nine. The ways of the settlers were not the ways of the Indians. The culture of the white people clashed with the culture of the red people -- often in violence. The United States army was sent to move the Indians and protect the settlers. Many Indian tribes refused to move. Their lands, they said, contained the bones of their fathers and mothers. It was holy ground. They fought the soldiers. Crazy Horse's tribe, the Lakota, had many powerful leaders and skilled warriors. Crazy Horse, himself, was greatly feared. The soldiers could not defeat him in battle.

Most white people did not understand why the Lakota fought so hard. They knew little of the Indians' way of life. They did not know Crazy Horse at all. Much of what we have learned about Crazy Horse came from his own people. Even today, they still talk about him. To the Lakota, he was both a warrior and a holy man. No one knows for sure when Crazy Horse was born. Perhaps around the year eighteen forty. But we do know when he died. In eighteen seventy-seven, when he was in his middle thirties. There are no photographs of Crazy Horse. But it is said that he was not very tall. And his skin was lighter than most of the Lakota people. As a boy, Crazy Horse loved to listen to the teachings of the Lakota religion. His father was a holy man of the tribe -- a medicine man. He taught the boy to honor all things, because all things had a life of their own. Not only people and animals had spirits, he said, but trees and rivers, as well. Above all was the Great Spirit. Crazy Horse's father also told him that a man should be judged only by the goodness of his actions.

So the boy tried hard to tell the truth at all times and not to speak badly of others. Crazy Horse learned to be a hunter. He could lie quietly for hours watching wild animals. When he killed a bird or a deer, he always sang a prayer of thanks and sorrow. He always gave the meat to the poor and to the families that had no hunters. That was what Lakota chiefs did. In time, Crazy Horse learned that the Indians were not alone in their world. He watched one day as tribesmen brought back the body of one of the chiefs, Conquering Bear. The chief had been shot many times by soldiers after a dispute over a white man's cow. Two times in the next few years, young Crazy Horse saw the burned remains of Indian villages. All the village people, including women and children, had been shot by soldiers. All these events helped shape the personality of the young Indian. Crazy Horse became very quiet. He would go away from his village and spend days alone. His people began to call him "the strange one." The name Crazy Horse -- in the language of the Lakota -- meant wild horse. When it was time for him to plan his future, his father took him high into the mountains.

Together, they sang a prayer to the Great Spirit, a prayer like this: "Grandfather, Great Spirit, you have existed always, and before you there was no one. Stand close to the Earth that you may hear the voice I send. You, where the sun goes down, look at me! You, where the snow lives...you, where the day begins...you, where the summer lives ... you, in the depths of the heavens, look at me! And you, Mother Earth. Give me eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. Only with your power can I face the winds." Crazy Horse stayed on the mountain by himself for three days and nights. He did not eat or drink. He prayed that the Great Spirit would send him a dream to show him how to live. Crazy Horse dreamed. He entered the world of truth and of the spirits of all things. The Lakota people called this "the real world". They believed our world was only an image of the real world. In his dream, Crazy Horse saw a man riding a horse through clouds of darkness and battle. Bullets flew around him, but did not hit him.

The man wore a stone under one ear, and a bird feather in his hair. His body was painted with sharp white lines, like lightning. A light followed him, but it was sometimes covered by darkness. Crazy Horse understood the dream as a sign. He knew his people were entering a time of darkness. He dressed himself like the man in the dream, so that no bullets would hurt him. He would try to save his land for his people. He would try to protect their way of living. Crazy Horse prayed every day -- as the sun rose, at noon, and as night came. He prayed whenever he had something difficult to do. The prayer songs would carry him back to the peace of "the real world". He would know the right thing to do. In the village, Crazy Horse did not keep things for himself. He even gave away his food. If others needed the food more, he would not eat at all. Crazy Horse spent much of his time with the children. He talked and joked with them. Yet his eyes looked through the children. He seemed to be thinking of something else. Crazy Horse fought in more than twenty battles against the American army. He was never hit by an enemy's bullet.

In battle, his mind was clear. "Be brave!" the young men would shout as they followed him into battle. "The Earth is all that lasts." But the Earth the Indians knew did not last. The government would take most of it. The army destroyed Indian villages and captured those who would not surrender. Almost all the buffalo were gone, killed by white hunters. The people were hungry. Many Lakota and other Indians came to Crazy Horse for protection. The government sent a message to Crazy Horse. It said if he surrendered, his people could live and hunt on a part of the land that he chose. Crazy Horse and his people could fight no more. They accepted the government offer. They surrendered. The government, however, did not keep its promise to let them choose where they would live. Several months later, on September fifth, eighteen seventy-seven, Crazy Horse went to the army commander to make an angry protest. Guards arrested him. He struggled to escape. A soldier stabbed him with a knife. The great Lakota Indian chief died the next day. In nineteen thirty-nine, the tribe asked an artist to make a statue of Crazy Horse. The Indians wanted a huge statue cut into the side of a mountain.

It would show Crazy Horse riding a running horse, pointing his arm to where the Earth meets the sky -- to the lands of the Lakota people. The tribe told the artist: "We would like the white man to know the red man had great heroes, too." If you visit the mountain to see the statue, you may hear in the wind the song of an old man. He sings: "Crazy Horse, your people depend on you. Be brave. Defend your people!" This Special English program was written by Barbara Dash. It was produced by Mario Ritter. Our studio engineer was Sulaiman Tarawaley. I'm Steve Ember. And I'm Phoebe Zimmermann. Join us again next week for another PEOPLE IN AMERICA program on the Voice of America. The History of the Native American Indian named Crazy Horse Contact Us Crazy Horse Crazy Horse, a Sioux Indian that led in the Sioux wars during the 1860's to the 1870's, was a respected member and leader of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. Born around 1840, his name was first Light Hair. It is a common practice among these Native Americans to change the name of a child as they grow up.

At the age of 10, Crazy Horse was known as His Horse On Sight. His father went by the name Crazy Horse until he passed his name down to his son at the age of 18. Once passing the name down, his father took the name of Worm. His mother was known as Rattling Blanket Woman. Worm was from the Oglala Lakota tribe while Rattling Blanket Woman was from the Miniconjou Lakota tribe and was a member of the One Horn family. Crazy Horse was unique in that he did not follow Lakota customs. He did not wear face paint or any war bonnet during battles. Neither did he rub dust over himself as other Lakota Indians did. His reputation grew as a warrior with amazing fighting abilities. In 1866, he led a war party of 1,000 warriors against the U.S. troops who were held up at Fort Phil Kearny. This would later be known as the Fetterman massacre and was the worst defeat against the U.S. troops at the time. This noteworthy American Indian is best known for his battle of Little Bighorn.

In mid-June of 1876, Crazy Horse led 1,500 Indians in an attack that surprised the Calvary in the Battle of the Rosebud. This battle delayed the U.S. Calvary from joining with Gen. Custer and brought on the defeat of Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Crazy Horse helped defeat Custer’s troops. The following year, Crazy Horse would fight his last major battle and soon after surrender to the U.S. troops in Nebraska. Crazy Horse would later die of a bayonet wound in the year 1877. Crazy Horse Was Chief of the Lakota, a Warrior and a Holy Man Crazy Horse Was Chief of the Lakota, a Warrior and a Holy Man November 12, 2006 He tried to protect his people's way of living. Transcript of radio broadcast: VOICE ONE: I’m Phoebe Zimmermann. VOICE TWO: And I’m Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Today, we tell the story of a Native American, Crazy Horse. He was a leader of the Lakota Indians. Some people call his tribe the Oglala Sioux.

(MUSIC) VOICE ONE: Crazy Horse's people belonged to one of seven great families who called themselves Lakota. The word Lakota means friends or allies. The Lakota people were hunters. They moved with the seasons. They moved through the great flat lands and the great mountains of the north-central United States. The Lakota depended on wild animals for food and clothing, and for the materials to make their tools and homes. They depended especially on the buffalo, the great hairy ox-like creature. Huge groups of buffalo ran free across their lands. VOICE TWO: Great changes came to the Indian territories during the middle eighteen hundreds. The population of the United States was growing. Settlers left the cities of the East for the wide open spaces of the West. The settlers followed the railroads extending across the continent. More settlers moved west when gold was discovered in California in eighteen forty-nine. The ways of the settlers were not the ways of the Indians. The culture of the white people clashed with the culture of the red people -- often in violence. The United States army was sent to move the Indians and protect the settlers. Many Indian tribes refused to move. Their lands, they said, contained the bones of their fathers and mothers. It was holy ground.

They fought the soldiers. VOICE ONE: Crazy Horse's tribe, the Lakota, had many powerful leaders and skilled warriors. Crazy Horse, himself, was greatly feared. The soldiers could not defeat him in battle. Most white people did not understand why the Lakota fought so hard. They knew little of the Indians' way of life. They did not know Crazy Horse at all. Much of what we have learned about Crazy Horse came from his own people. Even today, they still talk about him. To the Lakota, he was both a warrior and a holy man. (MUSIC) VOICE TWO: No one knows for sure when Crazy Horse was born. Perhaps around the year eighteen forty. But we do know when he died. In eighteen seventy-seven, when he was in his middle thirties. There are no photographs of Crazy Horse. But it is said that he was not very tall. And his skin was lighter than most of the Lakota people. As a boy, Crazy Horse loved to listen to the teachings of the Lakota religion. His father was a holy man of the tribe -- a medicine man. He taught the boy to honor all things, because all things had a life of their own.

Not only people and animals had spirits, he said, but trees and rivers, as well. Above all was the Great Spirit. VOICE ONE: Crazy Horse's father also told him that a man should be judged only by the goodness of his actions. So the boy tried hard to tell the truth at all times and not to speak badly of others. Crazy Horse learned to be a hunter. He could lie quietly for hours watching wild animals. When he killed a bird or a deer, he always sang a prayer of thanks and sorrow. He always gave the meat to the poor and to the families that had no hunters. That was what Lakota chiefs did. VOICE TWO: In time, Crazy Horse learned that the Indians were not alone in their world. He watched one day as tribesmen brought back the body of one of the chiefs, Conquering Bear. The chief had been shot many times by soldiers after a dispute over a white man's cow. Two times in the next few years, young Crazy Horse saw the burned remains of Indian villages. All the village people, including women and children, had been shot by soldiers. All these events helped shape the personality of the young Indian. Crazy Horse became very quiet.

He would go away from his village and spend days alone. His people began to call him "the strange one." The name Crazy Horse -- in the language of the Lakota -- meant wild horse. (MUSIC) VOICE ONE: When it was time for him to plan his future, his father took him high into the mountains. Together, they sang a prayer to the Great Spirit, a prayer like this: "Grandfather, Great Spirit, you have existed always, and before you there was no one. Stand close to the Earth that you may hear the voice I send. You, where the sun goes down, look at me! You, where the snow lives...you, where the day begins...you, where the summer lives ... you, in the depths of the heavens, look at me! And you, Mother Earth. Give me eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. Only with your power can I face the winds." VOICE TWO: Crazy Horse stayed on the mountain by himself for three days and nights. He did not eat or drink. He prayed that the Great Spirit would send him a dream to show him how to live. Crazy Horse dreamed.

He entered the world of truth and of the spirits of all things. The Lakota people called this "the real world". They believed our world was only an image of the real world. VOICE ONE: In his dream, Crazy Horse saw a man riding a horse through clouds of darkness and battle. Bullets flew around him, but did not hit him. The man wore a stone under one ear, and a bird feather in his hair. His body was painted with sharp white lines, like lightning. A light followed him, but it was sometimes covered by darkness. Crazy Horse understood the dream as a sign. He knew his people were entering a time of darkness. He dressed himself like the man in the dream, so that no bullets would hurt him. He would try to save his land for his people. He would try to protect their way of living. VOICE TWO: Crazy Horse prayed every day -- as the sun rose, at noon, and as night came. He prayed whenever he had something difficult to do. The prayer songs would carry him back to the peace of "the real world". He would know the right thing to do. In the village, Crazy Horse did not keep things for himself. He even gave away his food.

If others needed the food more, he would not eat at all. Crazy Horse spent much of his time with the children. He talked and joked with them. Yet his eyes looked through the children. He seemed to be thinking of something else. (MUSIC) VOICE ONE: Crazy Horse fought in more than twenty battles against the American army. He was never hit by an enemy's bullet. In battle, his mind was clear. "Be brave!" the young men would shout as they followed him into battle. "The Earth is all that lasts." But the Earth the Indians knew did not last. The government would take most of it. The army destroyed Indian villages and captured those who would not surrender. VOICE TWO: Almost all the buffalo were gone, killed by white hunters. The people were hungry. Many Lakota and other Indians came to Crazy Horse for protection. The government sent a message to Crazy Horse. It said if he surrendered, his people could live and hunt on a part of the land that he chose. Crazy Horse and his people could fight no more. They accepted the government offer. They surrendered. The government, however, did not keep its promise to let them choose where they would live.

Several months later, on September fifth, eighteen seventy-seven, Crazy Horse went to the army commander to make an angry protest. Guards arrested him. He struggled to escape. A soldier stabbed him with a knife. The great Lakota Indian chief died the next day. VOICE ONE: In nineteen thirty-nine, the tribe asked an artist to make a statue of Crazy Horse. The Indians wanted a huge statue cut into the side of a mountain. It would show Crazy Horse riding a running horse, pointing his arm to where the Earth meets the sky -- to the lands of the Lakota people. The tribe told the artist: "We would like the white man to know the red man had great heroes, too." If you visit the mountain to see the statue, you may hear in the wind the song of an old man. He sings: "Crazy Horse, your people depend on you. Be brave. Defend your people!" (MUSIC) VOICE TWO: This Special English program was written by Barbara Dash. It was produced by Mario Ritter. Our studio engineer was Sulaiman Tarawaley. I’m Steve Ember. VOICE ONE: And I’m Phoebe Zimmermann.

Join us again next week for another People in America program on the Voice of America. Sitting Bull - Native American History - HISTORY.com Google Born in the Grand River Valley in what is now South Dakota , Sitting Bull, or Tatanka Yotanka, received early recognition from his tribe as a warrior and man of vision. During his youth he joined in the usual tribal raids for horses against traditional enemies such as the Crow and Assiniboin. Did You Know? The Lakota Sioux often used several names over the course of their lifetime. In his youth, Sitting Bull was known as "Jumping Badger." Because the Hunkpapa lived and hunted north of the early routes of western travel, Sitting Bull had little contact with whites until the Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota in 1862. When the defeated Indians were driven west to the plains, he heard from them what life was like on a reservation. In July 1864, he was one of the defenders when Gen. Alfred Sully used artillery against a Teton encampment at Killdeer Mountain.

It was during this period that Sitting Bull formed his resolve to keep his people away from the white man’s world and never to sign a treaty that would force them to live on a reservation. With other Sioux leaders he soon took his followers to the pristine valleys of the Powder and Yellowstone rivers where buffalo and other game were abundant. He continually warned his followers that their survival as free Indians depended upon the buffalo. During this time, Red Cloud of the Oglala subtribe was the leader of the Tetons, but Sitting Bull’s influence as a holy man was steadily growing. Beginning in the summer of 1865 columns of U.S. soldiers repeatedly invaded the Powder River country. Sitting Bull had occasional encounters with them, learning their ways of fighting, their strengths and weaknesses. After Red Cloud signed the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868, and then agreed to live on a reservation, his influence waned. Sitting Bull’s disdain for treaties and reservation life soon attracted a large following not only from the Sioux but from the Cheyenne and Arapaho. In 1873, he and Lt. Col.

George Armstrong Custer skirmished briefly while Custer was guarding surveyors for the Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana Territory. Three years later they met again on the Little Bighorn in the battle that made both men famous. Sitting Bull was not a war leader in that fight, but he had predicted that many soldiers would fall, and his followers believed that his magical powers had brought the victory. Although Sitting Bull survived, an aroused and vengeful army forced him to flee to Canada. In 1881 he returned to the United States, surrendered, and was held as a prisoner of war at Fort Randall, South Dakota Territory. After two years he was permitted to live on Standing Rock Reservation where he continued to use his influence to keep Sioux lands from being taken by the government. In 1885 he traveled for a season with Buffalo Bill Cody’s wild west show. The rise of the Ghost Dance, a tribal religion that proclaimed that all whites would disappear and dead Indians and buffalo would return, brought him into disfavor with government officials in 1890 because he made no effort to stop the dancing at Standing Rock.

When Indian police were sent to arrest him on December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was killed in a melee outside his cabin. The Reader’s Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright © 1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Tags Oglala Indian Chiefs and Leaders - Access Genealogy Oglala Indian Chiefs and Leaders American Horse An Oglala Sioux chief, known in his tribe as Wasechun-tashunka. He was probably the son or nephew of the American Horse who went out with Sitting Bull in the Sioux war and was killed at Slim buttes, South Dakota, Sept. 29, 1875. As speaker for the tribe he signed the treaty secured by the Crook commission in 1887, by which the Sioux reserva­tion in Dakota was reduced by one-half.

Nearly half the tribe objected to the ces­sion, alleging that the promises of the commissioners could not be depended oil, and the malcontents, excited by the messianic craze that had recently reached the Sioux and by the killing of Sitting Bull, its chief exponent among them, in 1890, withdrew from the council and prepared to fight the Government. The expected benefits of the treaty proved illusory. While the tribe were gathered at the agency to treat with the commissioners, their great herds of cattle destroyed their growing crops and were subsequently stolen. The signers expected that the rations of beef that had been cut off by the Government would be restored, and the agent began to issue the extra rations. In the following year, when drought had ruined the new crop, authority to increase the rations having been withheld, they were reduced at the most unseasonable time. The Sioux were actually starving when the malcontents took their arms and went out to the bad-lands to dance themselves into the exalted state necessary for the final struggle with the whites.

American Horse and other friendlies induced them to submit, and the episode would have been concluded without further bloodshed had not a collision occurred between some raw troops and Big Foot’s band after its surrender. In 1891 American Horse headed the delegation from Pine Ridge to Washington, composed of leaders of both the friendly and the lately hostile party, and the conferences resulted in the issue of living rations and in fairer treatment of the Sioux. Crazy Horse . An Oglala Sioux chief. He is said to have received this name because a wild pony dashed through the village when he was born. His bold, adventurous disposition made him a leader of the southern Sioux, who scorned reservation life and delighted to engage in raiding expeditions against the Crows or the Mandan , or to wreak vengeance on whites wherever they could safely attack them. When the Sioux went on the warpath in 1875, on account of the occupancy of the Black Hills and other grievances, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were the leaders of the hostiles. Gen. Reynolds, commanding a column of the army of Gen.

Crook, in the winter of 1875 surprised Crazy Horse’s camp and captured his horses, but the Indians succeeded in stampeding the herd in a blinding snowstorm. When Gen. Crook first encountered Crazy Horse’s band on Rosebud river, Mont., the former was compelled to fall back after a sharp fight. The band at that time consisted of about 600 Minneconjou Sioux and Cheyenne . Later Crazy Horse was joined on Powder river by warlike Sioux of various tribes on the reservation, others going to swell the band of Sitting Bull in Dakota. Both bands united and annihilated the column of Gen. George A. Custer on Little Bighorn river, Montana, June 25, 1576. When Gen. Nelson A. Miles pursued the Sioux in the following winter the two camps separated again south of Yellowstone river, Crazy Horse taking his Cheyenne and Oglala and going back to Rosebud river. Gen. Mackenzie destroyed his camp on a stream that flows into Tongue river, losing several men in the engagement. Gen.

Miles followed the hand toward Bighorn mountains and had a sharp engagement in which the troops could scarcely have withstood the repeated assaults of double their number without their artillery, which exploded shells among the Indians with great effect. Crazy Horse surrendered in the spring with over 2,000 followers. He was suspected of stirring up another war and was placed under arrest on Sept. 7, 1877, but broke from the guard and was shot. See Miles, Pers. Recol., 193, 244, 1896. Young Man Afraid of His Horses . A chief of the Oglala Sioux, contemporaneous with Red Cloud and one of the leading lieutenants of the latter in the war of 1866 to defeat the building of the Montana road through the buffalo pastures of Powder r. His Sioux name, Tasunkakokipapi, is not properly interpreted; it really means that the bearer was so potent in battle that the mere sight of his horses inspired fear. After the peace of 1868 he lived at the Oglala agency and died at Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Crow Dog Crazy Dog (Kangisanka).

An Oglala Sioux chief. He took no prominent part in the Sioux war of 1876, but in 1881 he shot Spotted Tail in a brawl, and for this was tried before a jury and sentenced to be hanged, but the United States Supreme Court ordered his release on habeas corpus, ruling that the Federal courts had no jurisdiction over crimes committed on reservations secured to Indian tribes by treaty. Other deeds attested his fearless nature, and when the Ghost-dance craze emboldened the Oglala to go upon the warpath, angered by a new treaty cutting down their reservation and rations, Crow Dog was one of the leaders of the desperate band that fled from Rosebud agency to the Badlands and defied Gen. J. A. Brooke’s brigade. He was inclined to yield when friendlies came to persuade them, and when the irreconcilable’s caught up their rifles to shoot the waverers he drew his blanket over his head, not wishing, as he said, to know who would be guilty of slaying a brother Dakota.

When the troops still refrained from attacking, and the most violent of his companions saw the hopelessness of their plight, he led his followers back to the agency toward the close of Dec. 1890. Red Fish . A prominent Oglala Sioux chief about 1840. He led his people against the Crows in 1841, and met a serious repulse which cost him his position and influence. Father De Smet met him at Ft Pierre, in the present South Dakota, in the latter year. Consult Further: Tecumseh, Red Cloud and Sitting Bull: Three Great Indian Leaders By J. Jay Myers Many brave and wise Indian leaders appeared and gained respect and fame in the late 18th and early 19th century. Only a few of them, however, had the diplomatic skills and charisma to go beyond leading their own bands and their own tribes to form and lead intertribal alliances. Tecumseh the Shawnee, Red Cloud the Oglala Sioux and Sitting Bull the Hunkpapa Sioux all had the right stuff to become legends.

Born around 1768 somewhere near present-day Springfield, Ohio, Tecumseh developed an early hatred for the white man’s steady encroachment into Indian homelands. When he was 6 years old, after invading Virginia frontiersmen killed his father, his mother took him to the spot and cried out to him: ‘Avenge! Avenge!’ At age 12, too young to be a warrior, Tecumseh watched George Rogers Clark and some 1,000 men defeat his people and burn his town. Filled with bitterness, he swore vengeance on the Long Knives. By the early 1790s, white Americans were traveling down the Ohio River, turning north and settling on Shawnee hunting grounds. Tecumseh led raiding parties on white settlements and helped defeat two armies sent out to subdue the Indians. Officials in George Washington’s administration feared a great and powerful alliance of the tribes, and the president sent Maj. Gen. Anthony Wayne out to ‘tame’ the Indians.

At the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Tecumseh was the greatest rallying force for the Indians, many times stopping retreats and inspiring them to stand and fight, but he could not prevent a crushing defeat. Read More in Wild West Magazine Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!! Nor could he prevent chiefs of other tribes from signing the Treaty of Greenville, thus ceding all of what is now the state of Ohio and part of Indiana to the whites. After that there was a period of relative peace between 1795 and 1809. But during those years, William Henry Harrison, a military man who became governor of Indiana Territory, used liquor, oratory and ceremonial pomp to persuade various chiefs to surrender 50 million acres. By 1805, Tecumseh was traveling between the Appalachians and the Mississippi persuading other tribes to join his confederacy. He told Harrison: ‘The Indians were once a happy race, but now are made miserable by the white people, who are never contented, but always encroaching. They have driven us from the great salt water, forced us over the mountains and would shortly push us into the lakes.

But we are determined to go no farther.’ His oratory, of course, did not stop the white invasion, and Tecumseh decided to make use of the religious fervor being spread by his younger brother Tenskwatawa, called ‘the Shawnee Prophet.’ He planned to reform bad Indian habits, to abandon everything the white man had brought into the Indians’ lives, and to try to form a huge confederacy that would include every tribe in U.S. territory. Within three years the brothers had built Prophetsville, a very large town where the Tippecanoe River flows into the Wabash, and had persuaded many chiefs that this was the last chance to stop the white encroachment. But in 1809, some Ohio Valley chiefs signed the Treaty of Fort Wayne, ceding many square miles of land. Tecumseh decided it was time for action and told Harrison he must give back the land. The governor, of course, refused. Tecumseh thought the confederacy was not quite ready for military action and withdrew. He went south to get the final agreement from a number of tribes to join the alliance. British Indian agents were encouraging an Indian uprising against the Americans.

In 1811, Harrison decided to take action while Tecumseh was away, visiting the southern tribes Tecumseh had instructed Tenskwatawa not to fight Harrison, but the strong-arm governor provoked a battle at Prophetstown by moving troops to within 600 yards of the town. Insulted, the young warriors fought on November 7, 1811. Harrison’s troops won the Battle of Tippecanoe, and the next day they burned the great town, center of the confederacy. The Americans had destroyed the great alliance. Tecumseh rallied many Indians to the British cause and helped capture Detroit during the War of 1812, but he fell on October 5, 1813, at the Battle of the Thames (near present-day Thamesville, Ontario, Canada), while shouting encouragement to his warriors. The leading proponent of Indian unity was gone, and there was no one to replace him to oppose white settlement east of the Mississippi River. Half a century passed, and whites began to appear in droves west of the Mississippi.

Red Cloud, was born about a decade after Tecumseh’s death, and his Oglala Sioux followers were willing to talk with the whites. There could be peace if the white man stayed out of Sioux hunting grounds and stopped using the Bozeman Trail. The government called a council for the spring of 1866 at Fort Laramie, on the Platte River not far from the Wyoming-Nebraska border. Negotiations seemed to be going well until Red Cloud and his chiefs found out that Colonel Henry B. Carrington had arrived with 700 soldiers to build forts on the Bozeman Trail. The Federal peace commission learned that there could be no peace unless a treaty had the support of Red Cloud, who was respected not only by the Oglalas but also by the Bruls and other Sioux and by their Cheyenne allies. ‘The Great Father sends us presents and wants us to sell him the road, but the white chief goes with soldiers to steal the road before Indians say Yes or No,’ said Red Cloud. He then stormed out of the Laramie meeting. Read More in Wild West Magazine Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!

A real war began, with Red Cloud the head soldier. Red Cloud was the only Plains Indian who could gather so many confederates and keep them together long enough to wage a successful campaign against the white man’s incursions. He gathered 250 lodges of Sioux and Cheyennes in the cause, which provided him with about 500 warriors, and carried on continuous guerrilla warfare along the length of the Bozeman Trail. Seventy white people were killed, 20 wounded, and 700 horses, mules and cattle were taken. The soldiers stuck close to their forts. The Great White Father had to do something, so in 1868 he sent out a peace commission. Whites, according to the Fort Laramie Treaty, were to be banned from Sioux hunting grounds, and their forts were to be abandoned. After the soldiers left, the Indians had the satisfaction of burning the hated forts. The so-called Red Cloud War had been a victory for the Indians. There was relative peace until gold was discovered in the Black Hills in the mid-1870s and the government failed to keep out the white prospectors.

Red Cloud, who had come to recognize the hopelessness of challenging the overwhelming numbers of the white man, did not ‘go shooting,’ and that angered many of his people. Although he came to believe in compromise rather than war, Red Cloud never stopped fighting to protect the Sioux culture. Unlike Tecumseh, he did not go out in a blaze of glory. Red Cloud lived until 1909. But like Tecumseh, he had effectively resisted the white invasion…for a while. The Hunkpapa leader and holy man Sitting Bull replaced Red Cloud as the chief symbol of resistance on the northern Plains. Born in March 1831 near the Grand River (in today’s South Dakota), Sitting Bull tried to avoid whites until the situation became intolerable. Then he called for action, and many Sioux, Cheyennes and Arapahos were happy to follow his lead. In 1868 many divisions of the Sioux rejected Red Cloud’s peace with the United States and did something they had never done before — choosing one man to be the leader of all the Teton Sioux. His name was Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse, a leading warrior, was essentially second in command.

The Fort Laramie Treaty, however, largely kept an uneasy peace until all Indians were ordered to go to reservations by January 31, 1876, or be deemed ‘hostiles.’ That March, one of the columns of Brig. Gen. George Crook attacked a Cheyenne village not even on the list of hostiles. The survivors made their way to Sitting Bull up in Powder River country, and he gave them food and shelter. He decided the time for patience was gone. Sitting Bull sent messages to all Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho bands. He wanted them to join him. In the spring of 1876, he sent out small raiding parties to steal good horses, guns and ammunition, while the U.S. Army mounted a campaign to subdue all Plains Indians who were off their reservation. In June, Sitting Bull danced the Sun Dance until he fell unconscious and had a vision of soldiers falling like rain. Not only did he believe in his vision, but so, too, did most of the warriors around him. The Indians would fight the soldiers and be victorious! On June 17, Crazy Horse fought Crook to a standstill at the Rosebud.

Sitting Bull’s vision had not yet come true, but one of the leading white fighting men had been knocked out of the picture. Sitting Bull moved his great allied camp to find more plentiful food for his people and horses. (see ‘Sitting Bull’s Movable Village’ in the December 2000 Wild West). He eventually chose a place along the Little Bighorn River where the grass was good and there was game nearby. That is where Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry found them. Although Sitting Bull and his allies won a great battle, on June 25-26 at the Little Bighorn, they could not win the war. Most of the Indians, hungry and desperate, returned to the reservations the next year. Sitting Bull instead went to Canada, where he found peace for a while. On July 19, 1881, he, along with 187 followers, turned himself in at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory. Sitting Bull mostly stayed at the Standing Rock Agency beginning in 1883 and continued to have much influence.

When the Ghost Dance movement stirred up the Sioux in 1890, he became — at least in some eyes — a feared figure once more. On December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull died in a fight near his cabin on the Grand River when Indian police attempted to arrest him. Of Tecumseh, Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, which one was the greatest? Tecumseh’s widespread and powerful alliance was betrayed by his brother. Sitting Bull put together the most complete and famous single Indian victory. Red Cloud, however, actually defeated the U.S. Army over a long campaign and temporarily shamed it. The nod probably must go to Red Cloud. Read More in Wild West Magazine Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!! This article was written by J. Jay Myers and originally appeared in the October 2001 issue of Wild West. Biographies for Kids: Crazy Horse Occupation: Sioux Indian War Chief Born: c. 1840 somewhere in South Dakota Died: September 5, 1877 in Fort Robinson, Nebraska Best known for: Leading the Sioux in their fight against the U.S. government Biography: Where did Crazy Horse grow up?

Crazy Horse was born around the year 1840 in South Dakota. He grew up in a small village as part of the Lakota people. His birth name was Cha-O-Ha which means "Among the Trees." Growing up, the people in his tribe called him Curly because he had curly hair. As a young boy, Curly wasn't very big, but he was very brave. Whether it was hunting buffalo or taming a wild horse, he showed no fear. The other boys began to follow Curly and he soon became known as a leader. How did he get his name? Curly's father was called Tashunka Witco, which means Crazy Horse. Legend has it that Curly had a vision of himself defending his people while riding into battle on a horse. When Curly grew older and wiser, his father decided to honor his vision by giving Curly the name Crazy Horse. His father changed his own name to Waglula, which means "Worm." What was Crazy Horse like? Despite his name, Crazy Horse was a quiet and reserved person. While he was a brave and fearless leader in battle, he didn't talk much when in the village.

Like most Native American chiefs, he was very generous. He gave away most of his own possessions to other people in his tribe. He was most passionate about protecting the traditional ways of his people. The Grattan Massacre When Crazy Horse was still a boy, a number of U.S. soldiers entered his camp and claimed that one of the village men had stolen a cow from a local farmer. An argument ensued and one of the soldiers shot and killed Chief Conquering Bear. The men of the tribe fought back and killed the soldiers. This started a war between the Sioux Nation and the United States. Fighting for His Land After the Grattan Massacre, Crazy Horse knew what he had to do. He would fight to protect the land and traditions of his people. Over the next several years, Crazy Horse earned a reputation as a brave and fearsome warrior. Crazy Horse fought in many raids on white settlements during Red Cloud's War. The war ended with the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. The treaty said that the Lakota people owned the Black Hills. Soon, however, gold was discovered in the Black Hills and settlers were moving into the Lakota lands once again.

The people needed a new leader and, at the young age of 24, Crazy Horse became war chief over his people. Battle of Little Big Horn In 1876, Crazy Horse led his men into battle against Colonel George Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn. A few days before the battle, Crazy Horse and his men held off the advancement of General George Crook at the Battle of Rosebud. This left Colonel Custer's men badly outnumbered. At the Battle of Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse and his warriors helped to surround Custer's men. When Custer dug in to make his famous "Last Stand", legend has it that it was Crazy Horse who led the final charge overwhelming Custer's soldiers. Death Despite his great victory at Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse was forced to surrender around a year later at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. He tried to escape and was killed when a soldier stabbed him with a bayonet. Interesting Facts about Crazy Horse The Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota will have a monumental sculpture of Crazy Horse that will be 563 feet high and 641 feet long when completed. His mother's name was Rattling Blanket Woman.

She died when he was four years old. He refused to be photographed. He had a daughter named They Are Afraid of Her. For more Native American history: Culture and Overview War! What is it good for? x You need to stand your ground! I only want good vibes. It's better to negotiate. Is the best defense a strong offense? x Only if it's absolutely necessary. I like to avoid confrontation. No, just a strong defense is sufficient. Yes! When is the most important time to celebrate? x When there is a spiritual reason. Milestones. Whenever it is tradition to do so. Holidays. Would you prefer to share your land or own private property? x I don't stay in one place long enough to acquire land or property. I'll share with others. I like my own land. I'd be willing to discuss a trade or deal. Which creation is your favorite? x

Question: To which native American tribe did Chief Crazy Horse belong?
Answer: THE SIOUX